The Armonia Effect: A Global History of Canada's State and Civil Society Responses to Afghan Refugees

Abstract

This dissertation examines Canada’s response to Afghan displacement between 1979 and 2024. Despite constituting one of the world’s largest and most protracted displaced populations, Afghan refugees long occupied a marginal place within Canadian refugee governance, overshadowed by other humanitarian priorities and filtered through the geopolitical imaginaries of the Cold War and the War on Terror. NATO’s withdrawal and the collapse of the Afghan state in 2021 altered this landscape. Over the following three years Canada resettled more Afghan refugees than at any previous point in its history, seemingly reaffirming its reputation as a humanitarian leader. Yet the federal response also faced intense scrutiny as actors across state and civil society pointed to delays, restrictive eligibility criteria, complex application procedures, and extensive security vetting that obstructed access to protection. Canada’s response thus presents a paradox: an unprecedented expansion of Afghan admissions alongside heightened contestation. To account for this paradox, I advance the concept of the armonia effect in refugee governance. Drawing on the metaphor of the armonia—a hand-pumped instrument whose sound depends on both airflow and the configuration of stops and reeds—the concept theorizes how advocacy generates policy openings when it resonates with existing discourses of obligation, institutional precedents, and reputational commitments through which states imagine themselves in the international order. Protection expands when moral claims align with an inherited architecture of law, security, and political identity that renders certain demands legible to the state. Yet this configuration also produces dissonance. Competing interests, narratives of deservingness, and structural constraints introduce friction into the governance landscape even as pathways to protection emerge. Through a global-historical approach grounded in critical policy discourse analysis, the study traces three developments. First, it reconstructs the Cold War and post-9/11 institutional landscape that marginalized Afghan displacement while embedding refugee governance within a global counterterrorism regime shaped by racialized and civilizational logics. Second, it examines how Canada’s military engagement produced narratives of Afghan deservingness through frames of allyship, gendered rescue, and securitized suspicion. Third, it analyzes post-2021 advocacy by veterans and diaspora organizations, showing how these actors translated crisis into policy-legible demands that expanded protection in stratified and uneven ways.